The WoTUG series of conferences are a major forum for the presentation of state-of-the-art ideas on concurrency and communication. This book continues this trend, with these proceedings containing a number of papers that discuss a wide range of issues fundamental to the future of concurrency.

This work discusses a range of issues fundamental to the future of concurrency. It combines papers from researchers and practitioners. Topics include theory, such a development to Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, and hardware and real-time systems.

Communicating Process Architectures 2008 contains the proceedings of the thirty-first Communicating Process Architectures Conference (CPA 2008) organized under the auspices of WoTUG and the Department of Computer Science of the University of York. The aim of this book is to cover both theoretical aspects and industrial applications of Communicating Processes. Two invited speakers have given excellent contributions to this topic. Professor Samson Abramsky has worked in the areas of semantics and logic of computation, and concurrency. His work on game semantics considers interaction and information flow between multiple agents and their environment. This has yielded new approaches to compositional model-checking and to analysis for programs with state, concurrency, probability, and other features. Professor Colin O'Halloran has been instrumental in the uptake of formal methods in the development and verification of high assurance systems on an industrial scale. His research interests are in automating the use of formal methods and using these techniques at reasonable cost and on an industrial scale.

Modern computing systems work when all components are correct by design and can be combined to achieve scalability. This publication offers refereed papers covering various aspects such as: system design and implementation; tools (concurrent programming languages, libraries, and run-time kernels); and, formal methods and applications.

This publication contains papers from the Communicating Process Architectures 2006 conference, held at Napier University in Edinburgh. It is perhaps appropriate that a meeting concerning simple ways of designing, implementing and reasoning about concurrent systems should be held in an institution named after the inventor of a simple, and highly concurrent, adding machine. The house in which John Napier lived forms part of the campus where the meeting was held. The papers are very varied and wide ranging and subjects include various aspects of communicating process theory and their application to designing and building systems. One of the hottest current topics – safe and effective programming models for multicore processors (e.g. IBM’s Cell) – has a natural home in this community and is addressed. Other papers include a case study on large scale formal development and verification, CSP mechanisms for Microsoft’s .NET framework, parallel systems on embedded and mobile devices, modern link technology (‘SpaceWire’), various applications of occam, JCSP and JCSP.net (video processing, robotics, massive multiplayer gaming, material and biological modeling, etc.), visual design languages and tools for CSP and real-time systems, new process oriented programming and design environments, new developments of the Transterpreter, efficient cluster computing and the debugging of message-passing systems.

Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) describes an approach to system development that is process-oriented. It makes no great distinction between hardware and software. It has a major root in the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). However, the underlying theory is not limited to CSP. The importance of mobility of both channel and process within a network sees integration with ideas from the ð-calculus. Other formalisms are also exploited, such as BSP and MPI. The focus is on sound methods for the engineering of significant concurrent systems, including those that are distributed (across the Internet or within a single chip) and/or software-scheduled on a single execution unit. Traditionally, at CPA, the emphasis has been on theory and practice - developing and applying tools based upon CSP and related theories to build high-integrity systems of significant size. In particular, interest focuses on achieving scalability and security against error. The development of Java, C, and C++, libraries to facilitate secure concurrent programming using 'mainstream' languages has allowed CPA to continue and proliferate. This work continues in support of the engineering of distributed applications. Recently, there has been greater reference to theory and its more direct application to programming systems and languages. In this volume the formal CSP is very well presented. The papers provide a healthy mixture of the academic and commercial, software and hardware, application and infrastructure, which reflects the nature of the discipline.